JO DAVIESS COUNTY. 37 



Elizabeth, .shafts are sunk cue hundred and fifty feet deep, and what is 

 known as the flint strata among miners, was not reached. At the 

 places of these shafts the (ialena had been considerably denuded. The 

 flinty strata generally is characteristic of the middle of the formation. 

 It may be. however, that the estimate from this basis is too great. No 

 outcrop observed was over about two hundred feet thick. 



Its lithological and stratigraphical character is too well known, and 

 Iris been too often given in these reports, to require an extended notice 

 here, as all into whose hands this report will be likely to fall will proba- 

 bly have access to those descriptions. The rock is a thick-bedded, sub- 

 crystaline, compact, cream or chrome colored dolomitic or magnesian 

 limestone. It weathers out into forms almost as fantastic and pic- 

 turesque as the Niagara above it. Along the streams its weathered out 

 ledges present the same castellated and mural appearances: and some 

 of its outliers rise into towers and chimneyed shapes of the most 

 striking outlines. At Dubuque, or rather opposite Dubuque, at Dim- 

 leith. a curving tunnel has been cut through the solid rocky bluff, some 

 eight hundred feet in length, for the purpose of permitting railroad 

 trains to pass over the new bridge across the Mississippi river at this 

 locality. This tunnel is about twenty-five feet above the Trenton or Blue 

 limestone. The base of the Galena here is not far from the water level 

 of the river. The rock removed from the tunnel is not so yellow in 

 color or granular in structure as that obtained from the upper parts of 

 the deposit. It shows the beginning of the beds of passage into the 

 underlying blue limestone of the Trenton. The rock removed from the 

 shafts and mines at Morseville and Elizabeth has a granular appearance, 

 and a color peculiar and difficult to describe, a color between a cream- 

 yellow and a cerulean-blue, if such a color can be imagined. There is 

 also, mingled with this, a greenish rock, corresponding with the rock 

 found at the green rock openings about Mineral Point. 



Other peculiarities of this limestone will be noticed when I come to 

 speak of the lead deposits under the head of economical geology. 



Fossils are not so numerous in the Galena limestone of this county as 

 in that of Carroll. Stephenson, or Winnebago. At Morseville, among 

 the stones and debris thrown out from the lead diggings, I obtained 

 several fine specimens of Bdh't'oplion. the only fossil there observed. 

 Him- an* ' Id and I. taunts have both been found at Galena; a 



large species of Cypriainlitc* is also frequently found, especially in the 

 quarries in Carroll county. Murchixoni<i be.Uicincta and ReoeptacuUtes 

 Oiceni, two of the most characteristic Galena fossils, are found less fre- 

 quently here than in any other portion of the formation in neighboring 

 counties. A section of the largest O/-///orr/-<f ever discovered in the lead 

 region, perhaps, was found in the Galena limestone at Morseville, some 



